Common Minimum Program
Budgets are not made in heaven, at least not for the poor. The unfortunate fact of life is that man-made budgets caters mainly for the rich, the hapless get by with lip-service and a lot of rhetoric force-fed down their throats in lieu of food and water. As someone employing, mostly khaki-collar workers, one can personally vouch that while the raising of the minimum salary to Rs 3000 pm from Rs 2500 pm is extremely welcome, it is not enough. For eking out the most meager existence in the prevailing rate of inflation (State Bank of Pakistan assessed it a double-digit 11% in comparison to the 9.3% claimed by the government), the very minimum a family unit of four requires for survival on the poverty-line is Rs 4000 pm. That is a ground reality as evidenced on hard fact, not based on the theoretical calculations of paper-shufflers confined to their air-conditioned offices who have to rely on inaccurate observations of others, they are fed what they want to hear. The minimum wage must be Rs 4000 pm, the alternative is that millions and millions of our countrymen will keep going deeper into debt (upto 1000 pm) just to stay alive.
Elections or Accountability?
The great debate about whether elections should be held first or accountability should precede elections is on. Having swiftly enacted the Ehtesab (Accountability) Ordinance, the Caretaker Government have also appointed as Chief Ehtesab Commissioner, a respected non-controversial retired Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court, Mr. Ghulam Mujaddid Mirza. Both the President and the Caretaker PM Malik Meraj Khalid have repeated the intention of the Caretaker government to have the February 3 elections as scheduled. Given the enormous task of holding a whole slate of people accountable since January 1, 1986, it would seem logistically impossible to complete the accountability process in the next 70 days. How then do we reconcile this great divide?
The arguments for accountability are very cogent. This nation has been looted in the name of democracy under the flimsy cover of the Constitution. Given the enormous wealth in the hand of the looters they could conceivably buy their way back into power and thus frustrate the accountability process. We have seen how Ms Benazir, without a mandate from the people, was manipulated into power by a combination of power and intrigue in 1993. Conceivably money and intrigue could play a part in foisting the likes of Zardari on us again. Even in first world countries like the US, an election campaign war chest is important to winning elections, in Third World countries where voters are mostly illiterate or ignorant on a relative basis, an enormous election fund is more than likely to ensure victory. To add insult to injury, the looters will use a classic “Judo play”, using money looted from the national treasury to influence the voters so that once in power they can proceed to loot the nation even more, inflicting more torture on the populace. By itself, this makes for good enough reason to delay the elections until the accountability process is complete.
Direct Vote and Democracy
The basis of democracy is that every individual has occasion to exercise his or her vote freely to choose individuals for a particular seat or post. This vote is not transferable and cannot be exercised by proxy. Given the basic concept of adult franchise, any indirect vote is bound to be controversial, particularly since it transfers the basic individual right of choice of electors of one constituency to another individual who then takes a solitary decision on behalf of others which may not be really representative. In third world countries where individuals are invariably more susceptible to the influences of power, money etc than in western countries, there is always the possibility that for various considerations the indirect vote may be cast against the actual aspirations of the basic unit of a democracy, the individual citizen. Therefore, it inculcates an element of corruption at its very inception. Moreover, it circumvents the process of a candidate’s accountability before the masses that is one of the basic premises of democracy.
The Federal structure in Pakistan is composed of the directly elected National Assembly and an indirectly elected Upper House called the Senate. Albeit peopled by some very fine men and women for the most part, the indirect elections to the Senate (each Province has equal number of seats with a number reserved for technocrats, etc) offers an opportunity for chicanery inasmuch as the Electoral College is composed of the members of the respective Provincial Assemblies (with Punjab having the maximum of 240 electors for 20 Senate seats i.e 12 electors can vote into office a Senator while at the other end of the scale Balochistan’s 45 electors vote also for 20 Senate seats, i.e. only 2 votes to get a Senator elected). While the Senate is supposedly a higher body than the National Assembly (NA), this lop-sided indirect elections to fill its seats contradicts its higher status, undercutting the basic principle of exercise of adult franchise to fill all electable slots in a democracy. It gives an inordinate advantage to those with money and/or influence to become members of the Upper House. Conceivably those who have made their money illegally and do not want to go through the exhaustive “accountability before the masses” process of a full fledged election campaign, can avoid the elections to the Provincial (PA) or National Assemblies (NA) and “purchase” the small number of necessary voters to get elected to the Senate by either giving “donations” to individual legislators or to the political party whose support they want. One should not forget that this concept of indirect vote was firmly rejected by the Pakistani populace in the form of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s 80,000 Basic Democrats who formed an Electoral College to elect (Provincial and National) legislators, etc as well as the President. The Opposition to this concept stemmed from the fact that the masses were effectively disenfranchised by the indirect method and that the smaller number of elections could be influenced to cast their vote in particular manner by various means, some of them coercive in nature. The same principle must apply to the Senate, being a higher body than the National Assembly, it’s claim to legality can only be borne out if its members are directly elected by the populace. To give continuity to the democratic process, direct elections to the Senate, where members’ terms should only be of four years, can be held during the mid-term stage of the NA (and PA) elections (whose terms must also be shortened from five to four years as per Ms Benazir’s pre-election promise).